Washing Clothes Only When They Need It

I’m a huge fan of the ‘smell test’. Or, with small kids, the ‘is-there-unknown-substances-stuck-on’ test. My shirts get washed after each wear, but my jeans can easily go several days. Not only do more frequent loads of laundry cost more, but they also wear clothes out faster, meaning I need to go clothes shopping more often.

The alternative: more laundry, more frequent clothes shopping.

Making Coffee at Home

Occasionally I’ll splurge on a really good cup of coffee, but most of the time brewing Maxwell House at home is good enough for me.

Making Breakfast at Home

Every morning, I take a little time to make a fried egg or two and a couple of slices of toast. Sure, not the full breakfast spread some are used to, but enough to get me going for the day. Skipping breakfast altogether would be even worse, since that would leave me vulnerable to endless snacking.

Drinking Water When Dining Out

I never order a beverage, alcoholic or otherwise, when dining out. I order ice water with lemon. Saves me calories as well as money. I’m a moderate alcohol drinker, so if I decide I want to have a “drink”, I would do so at home and save 75% of the cost.

The alternative: draft beer, about $4.00. My cost: $0.00. Savings: $4.00 per meal, dining out once per week, $208.00/year

Taking Advantage of Frozen Vegetables

They’re just as healthy as fresh, they’re already chopped and prepped, and you don’t have to worry about them wilting and going bad in the fridge. They’re always on hand so you can add vegetables to any meal. (favorites: spinach, broccoli florets, corn)

Savings depends on how much fresh produce you typically end up throwing away!

Checking Sale Flyers Before Grocery Shopping

There are apps now, like Flipp, that aggregates the fliers in your area so you can browse them quickly and easily in one place. Or, go to your store’s website to check the latest deals.

Use a List When Shopping

Impulse buys are one of the quickest ways to bust your grocery budget. Make a list before you go shopping and stick to it!

Buying Boxed Wine

Buying wine by the box used to be little more than a sad joke but the quality of these wines have improved tremendously over the years; you can buy the equivalent of 4 bottles of great tasting wine for about 17 bucks.

The alternative: $15 for a bottle of decent wine x 4= $60 for the equivalent of a box. My cost: $17 per box, Savings: assuming a box a month- $43 per box, $516/year

Charging My Phone/Tablet at Work.

With the knowledge of my bosses, of course, I always charge my Surface Pro tablet in the office. (I use it for work, so it makes sense!) I hardly ever charge it at home unless I’m blogging on the weekend!

The alternative: Charging at home, every night, $0.0268 per charge (assuming $.14 per kWh, 47.8W charger, 4 hour charge). My cost: $0.00. Savings, at 5 days a week, 49 weeks of the year, A whopping $6.57/year! In ‘Total Vigilante‘ mode, every $7 counts!

Keeping our House Warmer in the Summer and Cooler in the Winter

I try and keep the heater and the air conditioner off as long as possible, but eventually I cave. In the summer, our thermostat gets set at 78, and in the winter it stays at 64 daytime, 60 nightime. I know there are some of you out there that go more extreme than this! To high-tech this, swap your regular thermostat out for a Nest, which will auto-schedule to be even more efficient when you’re gone.

The alternative: 72 year round. Savings: guesswork here, but a rule of thumb is that you save 3% of your heating or cooling bill per degree moved. Since I’m heating 8-12 degrees below 72, that means my $200/winter heating bill is 30% lower than it could have been. That’s a savings of $85/year just on heating.

Lowering our Electric Bill by Killing Vampire Appliances

Everything in our home, except the refrigerator, is plugged into a power strip. TV, DVD player, radios, cell chargers, computers, toaster, kettle, anything that goes into a socket is always turned off when not in use via the power strip. “Vampire” appliances use electricity even when they are “off” by going into standby mode.

Savings: While difficult to quantify exactly, we noticed our average power bill reduced by about 10%.

Dual Flush Toilet Valve

In terms of efficiency, this won’t beat the ‘if it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down’ rule, but it definitely beats a full flush every time. The great thing about dual flush valves is that they’re still a relatively inexpensive investment, and can be installed on your existing toilet. Here’s a highly rated one on Amazon for only $23. If you’ve replaced the innards on your toilet tank, you can install this.

Using LED Light Bulbs

As the incandescent light bulbs in our house burn out one by one, I’m replacing them with 60-watt equivalent LED bulbs. Same brightness, lower electric usage, longer life. Clear win.

The alternative: Incandescent bulbs, $0.36/month per bulb assuming average of 2 hours of use per day. Cost: Since the higher cost of the LED bulb is more than covered by the longer life, assume no cost. Savings: 20 bulbs at $0.36/month each, $86.4/year

Fixing Leaks ASAP!

That constant dripping in your kitchen sink is more than just a nuisance. You’re letting money drip down the drain. If you want to know how much, put a jug under the drip and see how fast it fills up.

Bonus savings if you do it yourself, but even if you need to hire a plumber, the cost is well worth it in the long-term. The drip is only going to get worse as time goes on, gradually sending your water bill higher and higher.

Skipping on Home Phone

Since we both carry cell phones, there’s no reason to spend on a home phone too.

The alternative: $20/month home phone bill. Savings: $240/year

Sharing Garbage Pickup With the Neighbors

Neither our neighbors or we produce much trash, so we’ve cancelled one of our garbage pickups and now split the bill.

Cut the Cord

We use a combination of Netflix, a TV Antenna (yes, I know it’s 2016, but they still work!), and the library for just about all of our TV/movie needs. My wife bought me an Apple TV that has a ton of apps with free content, even the networks have their shows on about a week after they air. Other than that upfront cost, all we pay is our monthly Netflix bill, and we don’t feel like we’re missing out on anything except a sports event every now and then.

Using a Low Cost Cell Carrier

We get cell phone service with Total Wireless, a carrier that ‘rents’ coverage from Verizon. We get the same coverage as Verizon customers for a fraction of the price. Another good low cost carrier is Republic Wireless.

Cut Your Own Hair

Cutting your own hair can easily save your family hundreds per year! Invest in a good pair of shears and some clippers and learn to cut your own hair at home.

The alternative: The average salon cut is $43 for women and $28 for men. A cut every six weeks for a couple adds up to $614/year – not including a tip! A good pair of shears and clippers: $25. Savings: $589/year

Become a Secret Shopper to Get Free Oil Changes and Car washes

We like to get our car washed about once a month and we change the oil about once a year. A few months ago we signed up to become secret shoppers and have gotten both of those services free ever since (sometimes with an extra $5 reimbursement)! Bestmark has worked best for us.

Doing Our Own Oil Changes

Rather than taking our car to the shop, we just do our own oil changes. Our initial cost was $121.50 for jack stands, ramp, shop towels (for cleaning parts), oil filter wrench, funnel (get the one with the cage on top to catch things- you will drop them in oil), gloves (box of 50). Oil is toxic. Use gloves. Also, the ramps were a necessary buy. The first time we only used the jack stands, and I was convinced the car was going to fall down and smush me. We still use both the ramps AND the jack stands because I don’t really trust either to keep the car lifted! Anyway, the initial cost is significant, but pays for itself within a few oil changes.

There’s a big HOWEVER to add. Because we (and really, I mean me) know absolutely nothing about cars, we went through three oil changes for each cars without having them looked over by someone who knows what they were doing. Then my car started making strange squeaky noises and before we knew it we had a $1,200 bill for brakes, plus the electrical was weird, and a few other things needed to be looked at/replaced, just because we hadn’t been servicing the cars properly.

So, if you are going to do oil changes at home, the big caveat is that you still need to take your cars in to be looked over for other mechanical/electrical issues so that the problems don’t build up. It’s probably easiest to do it on a schedule (our plan is to do a check-up once a year, so that we’re paying $200 a year to maintain the cars, rather than $1,200 to fix things), but unless you actually know your way around an engine, get a professional to analyze problem areas.

Batching Errands

Since I work from home, I try to wait and do all of my errands at once. This saves me gas since I don’t have to go out and drive around as often, or waste gas back-tracking to get all of my errands done. It also saves me time and makes me more efficient. Time is money!

The alternative: leaving the house to run one errand at a time, lots more gas. Savings: Not sure, but I know it adds up. 🙂

Driving a Small Car

This is not a new car vs used car issue to me- we bought one of our vehicles new and the other very used. Rather this is not buying a bigger, more luxurious car than I need. I wouldn’t get much more enjoyment out of driving a Lamborghini than my Hyundai Accent. And I don’t need both my vehicles to be the size of a Yukon. What we’ve settled for is a Hyundai Accent as a commuter car and a Dodge Caravan as a kid hauler. The comparisons could be endless here, so to keep it realistic, I’ll just compare our 2016 Hyundai Accent to the larger 2016 Hyundai Sonata.

For fun, check out the TCO on the Hyundai Equus- my savings would work out to $8,637/year.

Biking to the Grocery Store

There is a WalMart less than a mile from my front door. Recently, I became disgusted with the idea of cranking up my 15-seater passenger van (I have a lot of kids) just to make this short trip a couple of times a week, so I resolved that “I don’t take the car to WalMart“, and I’ve stuck to that resolve since.

The alternative: Driving to the store 2-3 times a week. My cost: $.0. Savings: gas is at $2 a gallon and my van gets 12 MPG, it’s negligible since the store is so close. $40/year

But for me, the money savings is not entirely the point. The point is to stop automatically doing the easy, convenient thing. As a frugal person who is trying to increase her personal badassity level, I want to make convenience my enemy. I want to look for ways in my life that I’m attempting to solve a problem by throwing money at it instead of applying muscle.

Bonus: my teen son bikes with me, so it becomes a relationship-building exercise. It’s also good for our physical and emotional health. Because we carry the groceries in our backpacks, we’re weight training. We’re enjoying the beautiful weather and feeling more in tune with the natural world. We’re subtly encouraging others in the community to bike short distances instead of always taking the gas guzzler.

Walking

I try to walk as long as the distance is not too far. This little bit of exercise is not much, but it really helps when you spend most of the day sitting down. For me personally, after taking the train to work, I will walk the last bit myself and save on the bus ride.

Drive Your Car For <$1k Depreciation Per Year

A personal challenge for me has been to keep my car costs below $1k per year, focusing on depreciation (the largest expense!). For example, I bought a Miata for $18k, drove it for 8 years, and sold it for $11k. Mission Accomplished ($7k depreciation/8 years = $875 per year). It sounds easy, but it’s NOT, and it helps you keep a focus on buying older cars and driving them for a long time.

Taking the Shoe Leather Express (Not Owning a Car At All)

I walk to work every day–rain, shine, or snow/wind/freezing temperatures! I also frequently walk to the bank or the store (and back). I’m a graduate student, but I live off-campus, and it’s about a 15-minute walk to my office. I could buy a car, or I could pay more for a closer apartment…but those wouldn’t be very Froogal things to do!

All this walking has vastly improved my cardiovascular endurance, not to mention my confidence in my willpower and Mustachianism (though Mr. Money Mustache would surely recommend biking, which is more efficient). And, of course, it’s saved me buckets of money!

The alternative: buying and driving a car. Savings: several thousand/year

DIY Home and Car Repairs

Do you own minor home and car repairs by watching Youtube. You can usually get the part for pretty cheap and there are an abundance of videos that will show you exactly what to do. It can save hundreds on a repair visit and then additional costs of parts. (Recent example, we replaced our fridge’s thermostat for the cost of a $20 part. It would have cost well over $200 to have a repairman come on-site.)

Savings: Depends, but typically $100/hour of labor

Shared by Rachel Palmer

DIY Dog Toys

We have an older dog who’s fairly gentle on toys and loves plush animals, so we get toys typically $0.50 – $1 from Goodwill. In some cases, the toys are fine to use as-is, but often we’ll make minor modifications to remove plastic eyes or noses to prevent choking hazards (which has the side effect of making the toys look delightfully creepy). And for dogs that aren’t so gentle? Make soft rope toys or animals for free, once your clothes are at the “washing the car rags” state.

An early victim

The alternative: buying traditional (flimsy) dog toys from the store, $5+. And toys that are meant to be durable for big chewers? Oof da, that’s a lot of cash, ~$150/year. My cost: ~$15/year. Savings: $135/year

Homemade Pixar Cars

Homemade Pixar Cars cars. We use white nail polish to paint a regular Matchbox car windshield, then after its dry, we use fine point sharpies to draw the eyes. Our twin toddlers love them – a fun complement to their “real” Cars.

Credit Card Signup Bonuses and Cash Back

As long as you can use credit cards responsibly, they are a great way to earn between 1% and 6% back on your purchase, as well as some pretty juicy sign-up bonuses.

The alternative: using cash. Savings: 3% of your spending.

Frugal Outdoor Living

I love collecting outdoor equipment from my local goodwill or craigslist for cheap! We have found great bikes, snowshoes, XC skis, backpacks, ice skates, and roller blades for pennies on the dollar. We love to explore nature as our date days (free), and stay in great physical and mental shape without needing expensive gym memberships. We rarely have big entertainment expenses, since nature is open 24 hours a day and always free!

Cost savings: I’ve incurred about $500 of set up costs over the last 2 years collecting quality gear. But because of this investment, we probably avoid a $50 date night every 2 weeks, and our local community center membership is $600 per year. So over the first 2 years of our marriage, we’ve saved around $4,000 exercising, and having our date days in nature for free! Roughly $2,000/year

Two, Three, Four or More is a Party

Travel with a group! Not only is it a lot more fun to travel with friends, but it’s also a lot cheaper. A $200/night hotel suddenly becomes $50/night when you share it with three friends. And unlike hostels, you don’t have to deal with strangers or other potentially stressful factors. Instead, you can spend time with people you love in an exciting new location.

The Contrarian Traveler

Off season travel for vacation can save big time money. The same can be said for the day of the week to fly. Most business travelers tend to fly on Sunday, Monday, Friday, or Saturday. As such these tend to be the most expensive days to fly. Flying around a holiday like Christmas can cost 2 to 3 x as much as flying other times of the year.

I’ve also found actually placing your flight booking in the first half of a week will yield cheaper prices. So for example booking on Tuesday for a flight 3 months from now seems to offer better prices than booking the same flights on Friday. There tends to be a sweet spot about 3 months before a flight. Closer or further away and prices tend to be higher.

Full Time Finance focuses on finding your value, and limiting your expenditures to those values.

Free Attractions

Either on vacation, or just a day off, use TripAdvisor for area attractions that could be free or cheap. We were driving through an area where we needed a break from our driving and had a few hours to kill. We used tripadvisor to locate area attractions in an unfamiliar and unplanned location. We could have spent a lot of money quickly and frivolously in stopping at an advertised amusement park or zoo, but we located a great find in Rapid City (Storybook Island) that was free for the whole family and fit our needs perfectly.

Submitted by Jen Kaisand

Roast Your Own Coffee Beans

Roasting your own green coffee beans is a great way to save on store-bought coffee prices. It is easy, can be done with a minimal up front cost (less than $30), and costs half (or even less) of what buying roasted gourmet specialty coffee does at your local store.

Wearing Clothes Until They Wear Out

I hate shopping for new clothes, so I will wear my clothes until they have holes in them. As they progressively wear out, they get downgraded from ‘good clothes’ to ‘around the house’ clothes to ‘working in the yard’ clothes to ‘washing the car’ rags. That’s right- I’m too cheap to toss them until they’ve been used as rags. This is also why I’m trying to learn to buy clothes that last.

Buying Baby Clothes At The Thrift Store

My wife loves designer baby clothes. She thinks dressing our son up in preppy outfits and looking like a baby model from Ralph Lauren is one of life’s great joys. Spending money on brand-new baby clothes can get expensive.

To save money, my wife shops at local thrift and consignment stores. She has been able to find great items for only $.75 each (thanks to Salvation Army extra savings on Wednesdays).

Of course, she always checks the condition of the clothes, and typically, they are really in excellent shape. Even if they are not in perfect condition, for $.75, we don’t mind imperfection. It is a win/win for me. She is able to have a preppy baby, and I am saving beaucoup bucks on items that she may have otherwise been bought at a much higher price.

The alternative: The average cost for baby clothes is about $360 for the first year of a baby’s life. Our cost: My wife has been able to spend about $1 an outfit which means we have only spent $120 this year. Savings: $240/year

Buy Diapers Strategically

In the first 2 years, diapers will be one of your most expensive costs. Keep your cost per diaper at the minimum. Skip Pampers and Huggies, and instead opt for store brands and other budget brands. Keep an eye out for sales and stock up when the price is right. Bonus: Use cloth diapers, which keep on giving!

Buying Car Seats Used

Not everyone is comfortable with this but a new seat can cost $200, and a used one can usually be found on Craigslist for $50 or less. As long as you trust the person who says it hasn’t been in an accident, and as long as it isn’t expired, you can save lots of money, especially if you have multiple kids, two cars, and kids who outgrow their seats quickly. We currently have 6 car seats and I think we paid a combined $300 for all of them.

Shopping Garage Sales

Sometimes I only find junk at garage sales, but sometimes I strike gold. If I’ve got nothing better going on a weekend, I’ll hit the garage sales to see what I can see.

Savings: no idea!

Drying Out Your Razors

This can extend the life of your razor for a very long time, especially if you do a good job drying it and don’t store it in the shower. True diehards swish it in rubbing alcohol before storing. I’ve been doing this for years and only switch out razor heads every 6-8 months.

Savings: I don’t even know how frequently people go through razor blades but I know they can be stupid expensive.

Submitted by Rachel Palmer

Putting 100% of our Pay Raise into Savings

The real challenge is avoiding lifestyle inflation over the following year by enjoying the modern day luxuries of living in the 21st century.

Set up our next pay raise to automatically go into a retirement account. Some might think it’s crazy to not reward ourselves with at least a small piece of that money, but we prefer to buy an extra slice of security and freedom with each new paycheck!

Invest Your Spare Change With Acorns

You’ve probably seen how spare change can really add up in a change jar. If most of your spending is done on plastic, you can apply the same principle with Acorns. Acorns rounds up your purchase to the nearest dollar, stashing the extra in an investment account! If you start an account using this link, you’ll get $5 free to get your investments rolling.

Taking Full Advantage of Your Payroll Benefits

Right now we have about $700 coming out of my wife’s paycheck to max out our Dependent Care FSA contributions for 2016. She just started working for the government, and the second we heard we could put up to $5,000 towards this (effectively saving us $1,500 as it’s not taxed!) we jumped on it. Making her paychecks literally around $600/mo, haha.. (we’ve also made sure to get the free matching in her TSP account, as well as incredible health insurance benefits so we don’t have to spend $1,000/mo anymore from being self-employed). Government benefits are pretty good!

Scanning the Skies for Deals

To save the most money on vacation, one of the best places to start is to look at ways to save money on your transportation. My favorite way to save on airfare is to go to SkyScanner, enter your “From” destination, and then for your arrival destination click “Search Everywhere.” Then for the dates, choose “Whole Month ” and then “Cheapest Month.” This shows you tons of places to go to and on the cheapest budget.

Michelle Schroeder-Gardner blogs about personal finance, RVing full-time, and more at Making Sense of Cents

Milk Some Honey Out of Your Online Shopping

If you do any online shopping, you should be using Honey. Honey is a free extension for Chrome and Firefox that automatically finds coupon codes and cash-back for just about any online store out there. When I purchased my most recent phone, for example, Honey alerted me to a 15% off coupon code, saving me $20 on the spot. It’s free money. You can download Honey here.

What About You?

Hopefully some of these ideas inspire you to save a little here and there! If you’ve got any that haven’t been mentioned, feel free to share them in the comments section! And if you haven’t already, check out my original post ‘Crazy (or not so Crazy) things I do to save money.’

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While I do strive to only write accurate information and dispense valuable advice, I am not a licensed financial adviser. All information is based solely on my personal experience and personal research and should be treated as such. Find out more.

I love #34 DIY Dog Toys, I would have never thought of this. You can also buy seasonal dog toys after the season is over on sale, as long as your dog doesn’t mind chewing on a Christmas theme toy after Christmas.
Thanks for the list, there’s a lot of great stuff on here!

My daily work commute is only about 8 minutes each way so I ended up saving $800-900/year when I switched my car insurance to Metromile, which is a pay-per-mile insurance plan. This is a no brainer for folks who don’t drive that much on a daily basis. This hasn’t stopped me from driving long distances on the weekend or the occasional road trip to Vegas from LA. It all averages out in the end and I’m still saving big.

Great post and it has definitely given me some ideas on ways to save! I completely agree with #6, skipping on the beverage when dining out. Even if it’s just a soda or iced tea those are still about $2.50 these days.

This is a really great list. Here are a couple more that I have personally done.
I bought my prescription eyeglasses online and paid only $93 dollars, including shipping. These were progressive lenses with anti-glare, and even included sunglass clip-ons. The same glasses at the eye doctor or a retail optician would have cost $250 to $450.
If you absolutely have to have cable (maybe because of where you live, an antenna won’t work, like for me), you can usually get a very basic rate for much less. I was paying over $80 a month for cable, I caledl the company and asked what the lowest cost plan they had in order to keep the cable active and they gave me the very basic $18.99 a month plan, an annual savings of over $700 a month.

This is one of the greatest list I have read. There are too many ways we can save small money. Small money ends up to a big lump of money.
Quite a few boggers talked about credit card signup bonuses. Does it only exist in USA?

I’m not actually sure where card bonuses do and don’t exist. They are certainly very common in the United States- as in 7 offers a week kind of common. I do know that Europe has a lot more regulations on credit cards than the United States, so perhaps there is something regulating bonuses.

Great list of ways to save money. While I would definitely try to do some of them on a regular basis there are others that are luxuries that I prefer to enjoy. But that’s the great thing about options, you get to choose what works best for you.

Yup, you’re right- not everything on this list is for everyone! There’s definitely things on this list I don’t do either. It all comes down to what different luxuries are worth to you and how much you can afford.

I recently started trimming my own hair. My hair is long and I curl it, so even if I didn’t trim it perfectly straight no one would be able to tell. I also use a fan to stay cool while I work at my desk for 8 hours. While the fan is on, I can hold off on putting the a/c on until 79-80 degrees.